Published by Vintage, 2022, 482 pages
Review by Usha Raman and Suroor Alikhan

This is the story of a friendship—one that survives betrayals and tragedies.

Two 11-year-olds meet in a paediatric hospital. Sam Masur is there after a horrific accident has smashed his foot, leaving him traumatized and refusing to speak. Sadie Green is there because her older sister in undergoing treatment for leukaemia. Sadie wanders into the common game room where Sam is playing a video game, sits down next to him and joins him. Eventually, Sam starts to speak to her, and the two become close friends over the course of several months.

But the friendship is broken by the first of many betrayals that dog this lifelong relationship. Finding out that Sadie has used the hospital visits to claim community service credit at school, Sam refuses to have anything more to do with her.

Almost a decade later, Sam and Sadie bump into each other at a train station. Sadie is studying computer science at MIT and Sam maths at Harvard, where he is rooming with Marx, an aspiring actor. Impulsively, Sadie slips Sam the video game she has designed for her class. He and Marx play the game and are impressed. The friendship is rekindled, once again by their common passion for video games.

This leads to Sam and Sadie designing video games together with Marx as their producer. While the two focus on the creative side, Marx makes sure all the practical stuff is dealt with. They start their own company, Unfair Games.

The first game Sam and Sadie design is Ichigo, about a child who is lost at sea and has to get back home with only a bucket and a shovel. They decide not to give the child a gender so that everyone can identify with them. The game sparks interest in Opus, a major company, that wants to buy it. Although Opus will market it much more widely than Unfair Games can, it will take creative control of the game, and wants to make Ichigo a boy. Even though Sadie is unhappy with this offer, Sam persuades her and they go ahead, and the game meets with huge commercial success. It also begins a series of uncomfortable conversations around representation, cultural appropriation, and the politics of creative work.

Almost inevitably, Sadie and Marx fall in love, sparking in Sam an intense jealousy. He has deeply loved Sadie, even as their relationship has remained platonic. Despite this, the trio builds a successful business, merging their design and storytelling talents with Marx’s business acumen. However, a random act of violence upends their lives and their work.

The story progresses through many twists and turns, offering us not only a nuanced portrait of a complex and deep relationship, a connection that survives despite the many tensions that run through their start-up life. The video games play an important role—Zevin writes about them in some detail—but rather than detracting from the plot for those of us who don’t play them, they are an essential part of it. A large part of the story’s denouement features a detailed description of a game-in-the-making, one that leads to an unfolding not only of a ludic journey, but offers a way to understand the relationship between Sadie and Sam. Those among us who are not gamers may find this puzzling, but it (literally) plays out in the end.

The book’s title comes from a key speech in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, rendered by Marx, for whom it explains the core of video games, in which there is always a tomorrow where things can be done differently. The conversations between Sam, Sadie and Marx, their working through the many ethical and philosophical knots that the marriage of commerce and creativity present, and the ways in which the limits of affection are tested under stress…these make the muscle that drives the book.

What I enjoyed most about the book was the nuanced portraits of the three main characters, and the emphasis on friendships. For me personally, close friendships are extremely important relationships, and Zevin gets that. Sadie and Sam weather tensions, betrayals, years of silence, but in the end, they always find each other.